Bloggers Discover Doctored Reuters Photographs

Posted on August 7, 2006

Bloggers recently discovered that at least two Reuters photographs were doctored by photographer Adnan Hajj. The discovery has led to Reuters firing Hajj and removing all 920 of his photographs. The doctored photograph was revealed by Little Green Footballs in this post.

Little Green Footballs says, "This Reuters photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation. Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop “clone” tool to add more smoke to the image."

It's obvious that the photograph was edited with Photoshop's cloning tool to make it look smokier. An article about this particular photograph can be found here. Reuters has since pulled all 920 of Adnan Hajj's photos.

Editor & Publisher has an article about Reuters firing Hajj.

Reuters also said today it had put in place a tighter editing procedure for images of the Middle East conflict to ensure that no photograph from the region would be transmitted to subscribers without review by the most senior editor on the Reuters Global Pictures Desk, according to a Reuters spokeswoman.

It is good to see Reuters doing the right thing and firing the photographer for doctoring photographs. Bloggers will be very busy in the coming days looking closely at all photographs related to the Israel-Lebanon War.

Bloggers have been good at finding fake photographs in the past such as the cloned troops in a Bush campaign advertisement and the Howard Kaloogian campaign where a picture from Turkey was used as an example of a peaceful Baghdad scene.